Camping

Guys and poles

Freedom, self-sufficiency and the great outdoors

The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars. By Matthew De Abaitua. Hamish Hamilton; 294 pages; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

CAMPING means different things to different people. For nomads, such as the Qashqai, Bedouin or Sioux, it is a way of life. For soldiers it is a solution to living in the field. For recreational campers it is about freedom, self-sufficiency and a re-engagement with the outdoors—“a way of compensating for the enervations of urban life.”

In this delightful combination of history and memoir with a generous dollop of guidance thrown on top, Matthew De Abaitua, editor-at-large of the Idler and an inveterate backpacker, shines his torch under the flysheet of camping, a pastime that can take many forms. Hikers, for example, take the survivalist approach with featherweight tents and minimal equipment. Festivalgoers often abandon their $20 “throwaway” tents. Some seek the historical romance of tipis and yurts while for others only “glamping”—luxury tents with pocketsprung beds—will do.

For many, camping is a way of exploring an unfamiliar place while re-creating the safe comforts of home. On a trip to the English lakes one 19th-century camping party took two tonnes of kit, including a harmonium, a separate pantry tent, a crate of biscuits and a telescope. The happy camping trips to France that this reviewer remembers from the 1970s were similar: children, their thighs sticking to hot vinyl seats, sat wedged in a groaning Ford Cortina tightly packed with camp kitchen, table and chairs, airbeds and lamps, boxes of “proper” food—inexplicably including numerous tins of Wall's sausages—and the tent itself, a brown and orange monstrosity weighing as much as a pony.

Whereas the advent of the car went a long way to bringing camping to the masses, the tent pegs of the outdoor movement were being hammered home long before that, according to the author's many historical campfire companions. These include Henry David Thoreau who, prior to publishing his seminal “Walden, or Life in the Woods” in 1854, built a campfire so carelessly that it spread and destroyed 300 acres of prime timber. Then there is John Muir, the Scottish-born founder of America's oldest environmental organisation, the Sierra Club, who camped with President Theodore Roosevelt, an experience that Roosevelt called “the grandest night of my life” and which inspired his protection of much of the country's wilderness.

The father of modern camping, however, is Thomas Hiram Holding, an Englishman whose 1908 work, “The Camper's Handbook”, established him as the figurehead of a craze that was deemed suitable even for women. They should, he instructed, wear a skirt that finishes three inches off the ground and knickerbockers of “soft angora, not cashmere”.

Not surprisingly neither angora nor cashmere knickerbockers features on the packing list that appears at the end of this book. Read the small print before you rush out to buy a tent, then read this gem of a book while you are sitting outside it enjoying the fine art of camping.